Honors College Writing Program
Most Honors students do much talking, and many Honors professors give grades for seminar performance. But all Honors students do a lot of writing, all Honors professors read a lot of writing, and in almost all Honors seminars final grades are based primarily on written work. The sheer amount and variety of writing done (essays, book reviews, research papers, problem analyses, short- and long-answer examination questions, and journals, to name a few) in Honors courses make it difficult to recommend any particular approach or model. Further problems are presented by the plain facts that different teachers have differing standards for what constitutes a good essay or research paper or examination answer and that different disciplines have different standards and rules for writing.
None of these difficulties should breed confusion, far less despair. Indeed, they present an opportunity for students to integrate the full development of their writing skills with their university courses in and outside of the Honors College. The Honors College Writing Program aims to insure that Honors students make the best of this opportunity through the construction of a portfolio of essays written during the course of their Honors program. Students will meet regularly with the Director of the Writing Program to discuss their portfolio essays’ strengths and weaknesses, to isolate and solve any outstanding writing problems, and to outline strategies for improvement and revision. The Honors College’s composition courses (Honors 1100 and Honors 3100) are integrated with the Writing Program (and fulfill University graduation requirements), and for all students the ‘capstone’ of the program will be Honors 4100, a one-credit independent study, under the Director’s supervision and normally undertaken during students’ last undergraduate semester, one aim of which will be to polish and complete the student’s Honors College Portfolio. Participation in the Writing Program is required of all students who first enrolled in or after January 1999. Students who enrolled previously may also take part, and indeed are encouraged to do so. Further details of the Writing Program are offered in Appendix B.
A Word from the Writing Program Director